I didn't say you couldn't write a trivial library to access sleep or chdir, just that I think it's ridiculous to need to do so. You may disagree, and clearly we

I didn't say you couldn't write a trivial library to access sleep or chdir, just that I think it's ridiculous to need to do so. You may disagree, and clearly we can still get work done in the language, but IMHO Lua is suboptimally small, and the local maxima for "tiny yet useful" languages would have a lot more in the standard library and a few "blessed" tools to boot. A language with the goal of implementing in the standard library everything trivial, fungible (one chdir wrapper is as good as any other), useful for most users, and portable across major desktop and mobile OSes (embedded users will know if they don't have e.g. a filesystem) would be a lot more useful yet probably not meaningfully larger than the existing implementations of Lua. Sure, this would mean more stuff to lock down if you're using it as a sandboxed scripting language, but a compile-time flag with reasonable defaults for a sandboxed environment could be provided.